Moby: Porcelain (Auto Biography) - Veganism, Breakups and the Big Time

[changeling67]

Reading this biography is cool, but I think Moby gets a bit bogged down in trivia and some of this has made me skim quite a lot bit. Can get a little boring in places - anecdotes that will not really inspire unless you are a hard-core rapping/hiphop/acid house fan from the nineties, where a lot of the names would eaier be exciting or would trigger nostalgia (although Flea from Red Hot Chillis, Run DMC and Madonna also make an appearance).  None of which is really happening for me, though I did like the music he mentioned - which I loaded earlier today (Good ol' Adamski - I was twenty two when that came out).

Things are picking up pace for Moby, but he feels that his relationship with Janet is at an end.  She is devastated, he feels bad, but knows it is the right choice; 'I was single.  Shouldn't that involve sex and love and bad dates and holding hands on trips to Coney Island?' (p.92).  Syndetic listing, uncovering an innocence, a young person's percieved reality to what the dating scene was like.  Sweet, in a way - basically, he was eschewing his Christian no-sex-before-marriage ideology, in ordered to get laid.

Confliction re veganism; 'As we passed a cobblestone path I realised that only twelve hours earlier I had been playing records for Russell Simmons and pushing my skateboard through puddles of blood.  I looked at the young, suburban Christians in the van: eight people, all kind and clean and well fed.  Specifically, well fed on the animals I'd seen bouncing on the backs of the meat packers' (p.82)

Running over a squirrel by mistake; 'All of the young Christians in the van cried.  They were filled with grief for the little squirrel we'd just killed.  I sat in the backseat, silent and judgmental, thinking, You eat a few hundred dead animals every year, but a single squirrel being killed by our rental van makes you upset? [...] I didn't want to argue with a bubbly nineteen year old whose worldview had been formed by restricted counttry clubs and gated private schools' (p. 83).  Love the WASP critique - Moby showing his little prole tail a bit, but unapologetically so - good for him :-)

Moby keeps in touch with Janet and he meets her new boyfriend; 'After we broke up, (she) had moved away from my world of hip hop and house music - and the furthest she could get away from club kids taking drugs with rappers was a tiny cafe for folk musicians, where they served cappuccinos and closed at eleven pm' (p.123).  I love this coupling of ideas. Binaries that conjour up different worlds.

Quote of the Day
Moby lands in London, where the shock of the new hits him - bustle of the traffic with its alien number plates, quaint and knackered Tudor houses etc., but ends up in a not-so-pretty part of town;  'It was a sad gray house on a sad gray road in a defeated part of London.  The sort of place where British directors made grim movies about the working-class hopelessness: 'Shut up, Violet, I can't get my job back, the mine's closed"' (p.153).

Channelling Danny Boyle per chance? Or seen one too many Pete Postlethwaite movie?